With its second season literally coming out today on Netflix, it’s a good time to finally talk about Aggretsuko and why you should watch it.
Aggretsuko, a portmanteau of “aggressive” and “Retsuko,” is a Netflix anime original centered around Retsuko, an adorable red panda office lady introduced as a single woman in her mid 20s. The show follows her work life as an accountant as she navigates the Japanese corporate workplace at a nameless company all while struggling with things like life and identity.
Two things set Aggretsuko apart from its slice of life anime contemporaries. First is the show’s characters, all of which are cute anthropomorphic animals designed by Sanrio, the legendary Japanese design company behind Hello Kitty. Second is Retsuko’s frequent stress-induced death metal karaoke screaming. Yes, Aggretsuko’s shtick is that the tiny red panda office lady often screams death metal at karaoke to relieve stress, which is where the “aggressive” in “Aggretsuko” comes from.
It’s precisely this clash between cute visual style and Retsuko’s furious emotional breakdowns that defines Aggretsuko. Despite its charming and simple aesthetic, short lines of dialogue, and bite-sized, 15-minute-long episodes, the series as a whole is a surprisingly layered and poignant piece of social commentary on the nature of Japan’s corporate culture conveyed efficiently through an overworked and disillusioned office lady. That disillusionment is ever present, but it’s more than visible when the flames of rage blaze at her back, her face contorting to the shouts of death metal. Then it’s back to a new episode with a new stressor and a new round of death metal to go with it. This is the show’s recurring visual and musical gag and serves as the very basis of Retsuko’s identity.
Retsuko’s problems are a result of constant overwork and exhaustion. There’s an episode in which Retsuko reluctantly parts with 30,000 of her hard-earned yen, which equates to roughly 300 dollars, as a wedding gift. This forces her to tighten her food budget for the month and eat bread crusts dipped in mayo at work for lunch. It’s an adorably heartbreaking little scene. However, out of all of her struggles, identity is the one Retsuko struggles with most and the one Aggretsuko spends most of its time exploring, placing special emphasis on the formation of one’s identity and its perception by others. For instance, we’re introduced to Retsuko as a timid, mild-mannered red panda office lady, yet despite her outward demeanor, it’s revealed at the end of the very first episode that she screams death metal on a near daily basis in order to relieve the accumulated stress from work so she can retain her composure and continue working as a functional employee.
Most of the time, she books the same room for herself at a local karaoke spot and vents her heart out alone, but sometimes, when the going gets tough, she’ll even break out the personal karaoke mic she keeps in her purse and rage against the machine in a closed bathroom stall at work. However, despite how good she is at it, Retsuko doesn’t seem to actually enjoy it at first. She screams death metal because it’s the only way she knows to relieve the pressures of her life, just a means to an end. In fact, she spends most of the show actively entertaining fantasies of escapism and pursuing delusions of grandeur in order to never have to scream death metal ever again. It isn’t a skill or a defining part of her identity to her yet, only a coping mechanism that she wants gone.
So Retsuko tries a number of other things throughout the season that aren’t death metal to alleviate the burden of her work, which has all but consumed her life. First, an escape is offered by her carefree, happy-go-lucky friend Puko, who tells Retsuko that she’s opening an imported foreign goods store and asks her to man the store and handle accounting. It’s such an appealing idea, especially when compared to the often degrading workplace environment she deals with every day, that she accepts with high hopes, hopes that are almost immediately dashed when it’s revealed that it’s going to be an online store because, who’da guessed it, renting a brick-and-mortar storefront is expensive, and that there won’t actually be any pay until the sales return a profit.
After returning dejectedly to her daily corporate grind, Retsuko tries to learn to emulate Tsunoda, the resident Accounting Department suck-up, a deer with doe eyes who always gets it easy by literally fawning over their boss, Director Ton, a chauvinistic literal pig who regularly mistreats Retsuko. Imitating Tsunoda in the workplace actually serves Retsuko well for a while, until it backfires when she slips up once and her duplicitous praise is seen through. Retsuko’s inability to keep up the act towards Director Ton is because it just isn’t the kind of person she is. She’s not like Tsunoda. Trying to be someone that she’s not was never going to be a satisfying long-term solution.
Abandoning all hopes of fixing her work life, Retsuko decides to look for love, hoping that with a healthy love life, work life will be at least be bearable. At a company mixer, she meets Resasuke, another red panda, who is the dullest, blandest blockhead from the Sales Department and falls into a romantic delusion. She projects onto him the visage of a handsome, charismatic gentleman out of her desperation for love. They start dating, and by coasting off the initial high of a new relationship, Retsuko is able to look at life through rose colored glasses and take on her job with renewed vigor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last, as their romance is kept afloat only through Retsuko’s willful denial of his oblivious and inattentive nature and her desire to artificially lengthen the honeymoon phase for its beneficial effects on her emotional state. She forces herself to ignore the red flags and to remain in love not because she actually likes Resasuke but because she likes the idea of being with someone.
Eventually, it reaches a breaking point and Retsuko dumps her boring boyfriend by taking him to her regular karaoke room, her own personal sanctuary known only to a couple of trusted friends. She breaks up with him by screaming death metal at him, something she thought she didn’t need since the start of their relationship.
The consequences of this event are twofold. First, the rose colored glasses are destroyed and she finally breaks out of her own self-imposed spell of false love that’s been tinting her world pink. Second and more importantly, she declares to both Resasuke and to herself that singing death metal is the real her. This is in stark contrast to the other times she’s sung death metal, when she’s referred to singing death metal as her greatest secret, something to be ashamed of, to be kept hidden from others.
This turning point for our main character is a moment of revelation. In returning to death metal after so long and reveling in it, she finally recognizes that it isn’t just an unhealthy coping mechanism that would be better off gotten rid of but a crucial part of herself to be cherished. Death metal becomes something she consciously and proudly accepts as a part of her identity. In that karaoke room, Retsuko effectively becomes Aggretsuko, a name that authentically embodies her true self, a self that is complex and multidimensional.
So too are the other characters equally complex in their personalities. Though we’re without the added benefit of seeing their personal journeys like we do with Retsuko, we are given substantial insight through Retsuko’s interactions with them. Most of these characters make terrible stereotypical first impressions on us, portrayed by some singular, all-consuming flaw through Retsuko’s eyes, but as their stories unravel, they’re all shown to possess unseen extra dimensions, much like Retsuko does.
For instance, during Retsuko’s brief stint into yoga, the yoga instructor is depicted as a one-dimensional gym bro only capable of comically repeating the word “protein” over and over, but it’s soon revealed that his spiritual senses have been honed to an almost frightening mystical degree. Retsuko’s chauvinistic pig of a boss is initially representative of everything wrong with an anti-progressive corporate honcho stuck in the past, but during crunch time at the Accounting department, he’s faster at calculations with an old-fashioned abacus than all the other accountants are with computers, signifying the value in the experience of older generations. During this grueling period, he even pulls Retsuko aside to the break room and gives her a piece of solid but brutal advice from a place that rings of quiet and genuine concern, instead of his usual loud and boorish misogyny.
Remember Resasuke, Retsuko’s ex and the most lifeless dude ever? There’s a moment when even Resasuke, who incited much vitriol from me as I watched him bumble about, turned it all around and delivered unto me the most subtly moving scene in the entire show. In the final episode of the first season, after being dumped by Retsuko at karaoke, Resasuke returns home to an apartment that’s revealed to be absolutely filled with all kinds of plants. Potted plants of all shapes and sizes, different colors, sitting on the ground and hanging from the ceiling, plants lining shelves along the wall, from the leafiest shrubs to prickliest cacti.
This guy, who was portrayed as the most forgetful, most careless, most oblivious person in the world, had this whole other side to him, a side that was mindful, caring, and patient. He was a person who could botch every social interaction to the point of frustration, but one who could meticulously nurture and tend to all the plants in his tiny apartment, giving them more space than Resasuke did himself.
It was such a succinct and short scene that I had to pause the episode in shock to process my guilt and shame in labeling him as a one-dimensional person. I thought that after nine episodes running, I’d already learned to not be superficially prejudiced, but I was proven wrong in the tenth and final episode of the season. While Resasuke should work to be more conscious of his partner’s desires in a relationship and more socially aware in general, that ineptitude isn’t all that defines him as a person, because he’s more attentive than anybody else when it comes to caring for his plants. Just as death metal is an indelible part of Retsuko’s identity, so too are his houseplants to him. They’re both only partially realized characters with hidden dimensions, and both deserve opportunities to grow into fully realized people at their own pace.
This depth is something that all, or at least most, of Aggretsuko’s characters have, and is something that Retsuko is originally blind to, but gradually comes to see. While these added dimensions don’t necessarily make these characters suddenly likeable like flicking a light switch, they do make them more relatable and their motivations more understandable, which is all you can ask for as a viewer who probably also struggles with the various social nuances of life.
To never judge a book by its cover is an adage as old as time that applies to everyone no matter how sure you think you are of someone’s personality. It’s a lesson that’s practically impossible to master but one that must be continuously and diligently learned every day, just as Retsuko does.
In the end, the show itself is an example of its own central message. There’s more to Aggretsuko than meets the eye, and you’d only know by giving it the chance it deserves.
